When Hoopoes Go to Heaven Read Free

hoping for a customer for Mama, and used that hand to balance himself against the big silver water-tank for the Tungarazas’ house as he stepped
over the pipe that connected it to the water-tank for the other house. Then he followed another pipe where it snaked up the hill through the undergrowth, all the way up to where the trees gave way
to grasses and the ground flattened out onto a plateau.
    The minute he emerged from the trees, the sounds of the traffic on the Malagwane Hill reached him: trucks heavy with logs from pine forest plantations shifting gears and applying brakes on the
steep slope down into the valley; buses heavy with people straining to make it up the steep slope to the capital. People said that the hill was much safer now on account of the brand new highway
that had two lanes for going up and another two for coming down. They said that before, when there used to be just one lane in each direction, there were so many accidents that the Guinness Book
of World Records had called the Malagwane Hill the most dangerous stretch of road in the whole entire world. Mama said it was because drivers were impatient, but Baba said it was because
drivers were drunk.
    The ground near the edge of the plateau was wet and muddy. The small dam there that supplied water to the two houses was where the dairy cows came to drink when they were grazing on the pasture
just the beyond the clump of trees, and Benedict could see that they had been drinking at this edge of the dam earlier that day: the mud that was now sucking at his shoes was patterned with
hoof-prints and splattered with large rounds of fresh kinyezi.
    Grace and Faith didn’t know about the cows and their kinyezi , and Benedict wasn’t going to tell. It was part of Titi’s job of helping Mama with the house and the
children to make sure that every drop of water they drank had been boiled for long enough to kill any germs, so nobody was going to get sick. But if his sisters ever found out that cows and
cow -kinyezi had been in their bathwater, there would be a lot more screaming than Benedict could ever rescue the family from.
    As he squatted at the edge of the water and emptied the tadpole out of the jar, he wondered how long it was going to take Grace and Faith to understand that a tadpole was a baby frog that
hadn’t yet lost its tail and grown its legs, and to realise that if a tadpole sometimes slipped into the pipe that led to the water-tank that led to the house, it had to mean that they were
sharing their bathwater with frogs. Eh , the frogs made so much noise at night! Where did his sisters think the frogs lived?
    On the plateau, the pipes leading to the two water-tanks were covered over by cement to protect them from the cows’ hooves, until they met in a thicker pipe that travelled under the water
towards the centre of the dam, where there was a pump for just in case. Just in case hadn’t happened yet on account of good rains, but if it did happen, there was a narrow wooden bridge that
led to the pump, and a person could walk to the end of that bridge and switch the pump on.
    Benedict had wanted to walk to the end himself, but much to his shame, he hadn’t been able to manage even a single step. There were gaps between the planks of wood, small gaps, gaps big
enough for only a finger to slip through, but gaps that Benedict could imagine his whole body slipping through and being lost forever. Eh! He knew it was impossible, he knew that imagining
such a thing made him seem such a very small boy, but still his stomach knotted itself in fear whenever he thought of trying again.
    Right at the bottom of the hill, where the long driveway began at the dairy farm buildings before winding its way up towards the other house and the Tungarazas’, there was a cattle-grid
across the ground – smooth metal strips with gaps in between – that the cows were afraid to cross. Benedict didn’t know if they worried that they might fall through the